The Next Shot

Words of investing wisdom that stand the test of time.

“The most important shot in golf is the next one.” - Ben Hogan

There is a weight that men carry from one decision to the next, and it is the weight of the decision they have just made.

The golfer who has struck a catastrophic shot - into the water, out of bounds, deep into the trees - carries that shot with him to the ball that lies ahead. His hands remember it. His confidence has quietly absorbed it. He stands over the next shot while still holding, somewhere in the body, the shot now sitting at the bottom of the lake. And so he compounds the error.

The reverse is true and equally ruinous. The golfer who has just struck the shot of his life carries that too. He stands over the next ball intoxicated, expansive, certain the magic will hold. But it does not always hold. The triumph can poison the next stroke as surely as the disaster did. In both cases the man is playing a shot that has already been played, and neglecting the only shot he can actually influence - the one in front of him.

Hogan understood this more deeply than any player of his age. He understood it because his life had furnished more occasion than most to learn it.

He was not a prodigy. This is the first thing to know about Hogan, and the most important. The game did not come to him as a gift the way it comes to the rare natural; he was a small, wiry, unfavored man who fought a vicious hook for years and went broke more than once chasing a living on tour. What he had instead of talent was an appetite for solitary practice that his contemporaries found faintly disturbing. He hit balls until his hands bled and then he taped them and hit more. He said, in the phrase that has followed him ever since, that the secret was in the dirt - that he had dug his game out of the ground through sheer repetition, one shot at a time, long after the naturals had gone home. By the middle of the 1940s the digging had made him one of the finest strikers of a golf ball the world had seen.

Then, on a fogbound Texas highway in the early months of 1949, a Greyhound bus pulled out to overtake a lorry and came through the mist head-on into his car.

In the instant before impact Hogan threw himself across his wife in the passenger seat to shield her. The act saved them both. The steering column was driven back through the driver’s seat he had just vacated - the seat where his body would otherwise have been. What it did not save was his own frame, which absorbed the wreck almost in full. He left the road with a shattered pelvis, a broken collarbone, a fractured ankle, and a cracked rib. In the weeks that followed, as he lay assembling himself back together, blood clots formed and began to travel, and surgeons were forced to operate to stop them reaching his lungs. It was said, quietly and by serious people, that he would be fortunate to walk again without aid. That he might play championship golf again was not a question anyone thought worth asking.

Sixteen months after the bus came out of the fog, Ben Hogan won the United States Open.

He did it on legs that would never again be whole, wrapped each morning in bandages before he could stand, over the punishing thirty-six holes that the final day then demanded. On the seventy-second hole, needing a par to survive, he struck a long iron to the heart of the green that has passed into the permanent memory of the game - a shot of such composure, played on ruined legs at the outer edge of exhaustion, that a photographer’s image of it hangs in the sport’s imagination to this day. He won the playoff the following afternoon. Three years later, in the greatest single season any golfer had assembled, he took three of the game’s four crowns, limiting himself only because his legs could no longer carry him through more.

Now consider what the comeback actually required, because it is not the thing most people take from the story.

It required, above all else, that he play the next shot. Not the crash. Not the career that the crash was supposed to have ended. Not the legs that had betrayed him on the walk up the last fairway. The next shot - the one ball, lying on the one piece of ground in front of him, over which he still had command. Every consensus around him had already filed its verdict on the man he used to be. The only reply available to him was the reply he had always given: to address the ball in front of him and strike it, and then to walk forward and do it again. He wrung a disproportionate result out of a situation the world had written off, and he did it the only way such results are ever wrung - by refusing to play the shots that were already behind him.

This is the discipline encapsulated by the quote, and it is the whole of it.

In golf you cannot replay a stroke. Once struck, the shot is recorded, fixed, entered onto the card, and the card does not reopen. Whatever it was - brilliant or ruinous - it is now history, and history is not where the game is decided. The game is decided at the ball in front of you. The professional’s gift is the ability to let the card stay closed on the last hole and give the whole of himself to the next one.

The investor sits over exactly the same shot, and mishandles it in exactly the same two ways.

He carries his disasters forward. The position that went against him last year sits in his hands as he considers the opportunity in front of him this year, and he flinches - sizes it too small, hedges it into meaninglessness, refuses the very conviction the moment calls for - because he is still playing a ball that is already at the bottom of the lake. The loss has entered his body and it governs the next stroke. He is not assessing the opportunity before him. He is re-fighting the one behind him.

And he carries his triumphs forward, which is arguably a more dangerous error. The great win of the last cycle intoxicates him. He addresses the next decision expansive and certain, sure the magic will hold, and commits capital to a thing that has not earned it, on the strength of a thing that has already been recorded on the card. The card does not reopen. Last year’s brilliance will not strike this year’s shot. Only the shot in front of him will.

Here is where the forward discipline becomes a specifically offensive weapon, and not merely a defence against tilt. The concentrated bet demands a clean mind to be struck properly. You cannot swing freely at the ball in front of you while dragging the weight of the last one. The investor who has made his peace with a closed card, who assesses each new allocation purely on its own forward merits, unpoisoned by the loss that shrank his nerve or the win that swelled it, is the only investor psychologically free to concentrate his force where concentration is warranted. Freedom from the last shot is the precondition of committing fully to the next. Hogan did not come back by remembering what he had been. He came back by giving everything he had left to the ball on the ground.

We spend most of our attention, in this game and in that one, on shots that have already been played. The score already on the card. The loss that still stings. The win that still flatters.

None of it is where the result is decided. The result is decided at the ball in front of us.

Play the next shot.

Stay still.

Win slow.

Theodore